


Hanging Tree

by I_Only_Act_Like_I_Know_Everything_2



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Fix-It, Gen, Post-Episode: s10e12 The Doctor Falls, beautiful and sad, but no happy ending, especially when you're already dead, redemption is a funny business, spoilers for season 10, twissy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-13
Updated: 2017-07-13
Packaged: 2018-12-01 20:26:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,283
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11494122
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/I_Only_Act_Like_I_Know_Everything_2/pseuds/I_Only_Act_Like_I_Know_Everything_2
Summary: "He should have seen this coming. Death was for other people. Not them."Six months after The Doctor Falls, the Doctor comes face to face with the Mistress again. Both their faces have changed. Has anything else?





	Hanging Tree

**Author's Note:**

> An idea I had on just what the next version of the Master might look like post the dramatic confrontation at the end of season 10. 
> 
> For those looking for theme music this is what I was listening to whilst writing this:
> 
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qIqyx8WSnPs

It's another spaceship where they meet again. A few months forward in linear time, halfway to the next galaxy over, but an age for him.

He supposes it is yet another of the many cruel ironies that exist in the universe that this first meeting mirrors their last. Another colony ship. Another quick betrayal ending with him tied to a chair.

She looks younger this time, he thinks. The sharp angles of her face have been worn away into something approaching softness. Deceptively so. Her mild voice and timid demeanour had lured him in; every action calculated to draw him further under her sway. Then the stars shining brightly in her eyes had shut the trap.

He had thought her a friend. Sira Clanow starry eyed colonist dreaming of a new life on Sto. A brave child hiding from the enemy. A victim. What a fool he had been.

Perhaps he could finally admit the truth now. Hope had made him a fool.

When Sira had whispered that name, her true name, something deep inside him had sung and died at the same time.

Something sharp had glinted in her eyes then. On a good day he might have seen it. On a better one he might have been wise enough to figure out what it really meant. Perhaps then his heart might not have broken again so badly.

He should have seen this coming. Death was for other people. Not them.

*********

He slumps back in his chair now. Watches her flit blithely around the control room, then swing wildly around the central pillar, a mad child at play.

He tears his eyes away from her then, forces his hands to return to undoing the ropes tying his wrists. He feels them shake.

She moves without a whisper of hesitation, as if she had been born to this ship. Entirely at ease in the castle she has stolen away.

Missy would have hesitated. Not for long. Just long enough to catch his eye, wink, gauge a reaction.

Missy is gone. Sira is less, and more, and somehow still impossibly unchanged. His last face would have frowned. The face before might finally have said good riddance. This face is just sad.

She seems smoother now, more complete. The uneven patchy mania of Missy's songs and drama has been replaced with a faraway aria, calling her away on the notes of a song even he cannot hear.

As she hums to herself he wonders if this is an improvement.

Switching abruptly back to sobriety, she walks towards the ships control panel as her back straightens. In quick confident strokes her long fingers program her orders into the computer. Her mouth quirks. The engines are rigged to explode now, he thinks. Manual trigger or twenty minutes. Finally, the breath that has been caught in his throat for all these last long months is allowed to drop.

She dances then, a star held tight on the brink of destruction, oblivion twirling in her hand. Still he cannot know how to feel. For a brief moment he curses his inability to let go.

Over 2000 years old and still he clings to the desperate hope that, despite everything, she might change. He is a fool. Their millennia old tug of war is a dance and the steps were fixed into stone long ago.

The voice in his head has gone silent. In the last moments of his previous self he had thought it a promise from a friend. Young and naïve, he had believed it a good luck charm, whispering inspiration in his ear and smiling at his achievements.

Now, somehow, already he is old and that voice has become a mill around his neck, the delusion of a man who refuses to know he has already lost.

In any case it is silent. This new Master, however, is not.

"Why won't you pay attention to me Doctor? I AM trying to teach you something here you know."

He hears himself sigh rather than feels it. "And just what would that be Koschei?"

"Mistress." Her voice is a command, cold and unyielding. He says nothing. The scorched ground of floor 507 prickles at his back. The voice in his head starts to whisper.

He pushes it down, locks it inside an iron box then closes the door. The Master never wanted to be saved. She had fallen down into the darkness with a laugh on her lips and neither need nor desire for a parachute. That brilliance was long since doomed to the void.

So why can he still see Missy in her eyes?

The Master has moved on now, rolling her too blue eyes and moving onto her victory speech, something about him being an old dog too old to learn new tricks and the defective regeneration making her left handed. The laser screwdriver twirls around her fingers, a lethal baton primed to fire. Her wrist flicks. The screwdriver goes spinning into the air before she catches it in her left hand eyes focused on the scuffed nail polish on her right.

He tests the ropes. They hold taut. His time is up.

One handed she adjusts the settings, a wry smile on her face. "Did you know I killed myself with this once? All over you as well. Rather self destructive, but it solved the problem."

He decides to play for time. "And just what was that?"

A pitying look almost meets her eyes as a smirk pulls at her lips. "You _really_ haven't figured it out yet?" Her eyes widen in disbelief. And betrayal?

A growl erupts unbidden from low in his throat. "What do you mean Koschei? What don't I know?"

She looks him straight in the eye, her mouth a line as her vapid façade fades. "Everything. Absolutely everything." A pause. "But that isn't unusual for you."

He tenses in the ropes, strains for his jacket pocket. "Why won't you tell me?!"

The Mistress shrugs. "Because it isn't my problem, Doctor." The screwdriver points straight at his hearts. "Figure it out when you're dead."

The tips of his fingers graze his screwdriver. His index catches the pocket, draws it wide. The screwdriver falls. It slips through his fingers like sand through an hourglass, racing towards the floor and his inevitable doom.

One last chance to run away. He closes his eyes.

The Mistress's left hand twitches violently. Her weapon flies up into the air still spinning. For a brief moment his breath catches. Then her right hand catches it, long fingers wrapping firmly around it with grim pleasure.

She points it back at him, lower this time.

A dull click.

The whir of gears in motion.

A triumphant smile.

White hot heat.

His binds fall slack, charred and burnt.

A haunting harsh laugh rings out across the ship, brittle in all too familiar places.

His arms fall limp. The clinical air of the ship is suddenly choking.

The voice in his head is back.

_"Time to go."_

Something in him breaks. A thousand moments rush by his eyes, preserved as softly as the flap of a butterfly's wings and sealed away as tightly as a firefly in a jar. It is only when the tears begin to far that he realises they are hers.

He feels the second sun shine on his back through the silver trees as he runs barefoot through the Forest of Serenity, the red grass catching in his toes. The light from a million stars shine from her eyes into his, the only time they will see them together.

The quiet voice whispers goodbye.

He picks up his screwdriver and begins to run.

Eighteen minutes later the ship explodes.

**Author's Note:**

> For eagle eyes there's an easter egg for another character entirely hidden in here. Feel free to try and guess it. :)


End file.
